Five Misconceptions on Cloud Portability

Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:06AM
Nati Shalom in Cloud Computing, Lock-In, PaaS, administrator, cloud computing, gigaspaces, jclouds

The term "cloud portability" is often considered a synonym for "Cloud API portability," which implies a series of misconceptions.

If we break away from dogma, we can find that what we really looking for in cloud portability is Application portability between clouds which can be a vastly simpler requirement, as we can achieve application portability without settling on a common Cloud API.

In this post i'll be covering five common misconceptions people have WRT to cloud portability.

1. Cloud portability = Cloud API portability. API portability is easy; cloud API portability is not.
2. The main incentive for Cloud Portability is - Avoiding Vendor lock-in.Cloud portability is more about business agility than it is about vendor lock-in.
3. Cloud portability isn’t for startups. Every startup that is expecting rapid growth should re-examine their deployments and plan for cloud portability rather than wait to be forced to make the switch when you are least prepared to do so.
4. Cloud portability = Compromising on the least common denominator.Application portability doesn't require compromise on the least common denominator as most of the interaction with the cloud API happens outside of our application code anyway, to handle things like provisioning, setup, installation, scaling, monitoring, etc.
5. The effort for achieving cloud portability far exceed the value. The effort to achieve cloud portability is far less than it used to be, in most cases, making it a greater and more valuable priority (with less investment) than it used to be.

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Article originally appeared on (http://highscalability.com/).